Someone sent me a VL CD in the mail. No return address was given. I had tried SUSE 7.1, 8.0 and 9.0 and Red Hat but could never get all of the on-board devices working. I first tried VL CD on a Gateway 2000 running at 233 MHz with 256 RAM and it worked perfectly the first time. I've been using it ever since.

Way back when in the dim and distant past I was looking for a distro that would be faster and lighter than Red Hat (pre-Fedora free version). I tried a number of small or mini distros and found Vector. I liked some elements but decided that it wasn't sophisticated enough for me and really wasn't quite ready for prime time. That was VL 1.5 IIRC. I kept coming back to it, though. By 2.5 it was closer to what I wanted and I bought a copy to support development. VL did not fully meet my needs or become my main distro until 5.1 came out. For the past 3.5 years it has been my favorite for the desktop.

We were looking for an operating system that would run on old computers that we wanted to give to kids. We liked Puppy, but the kids kept having trouble with it as it runs in root. As we did not have time to answer their questions, we looked around for an operating system that would run on old computers which could be reliably used by those not particularly adept at computer talk. We tried Vector. It worked. I then began using Vector so I could respond to the kid's questions. As I did so, I became convinced that Vector was better than my Microsoft machine. Now I use Vector exclusively and am quite happy with it. 6.0 is very good for my purposes.

After noodling with Unix in pre-historic times, I tried Linux when it was first out.

Dropped it and (Win)Dozed off a decade or so, only to be awoken by coworkers running amok in the office, crying "The Red-Hats are coming! The Red Hats are coming!"

A few years later, I got bored with Windows and took the 'shotgun approach' to finding out about Linux. I ordered a gazillion distros from one of the burn-and-churn distro CD shops online. (And, say, at $1 a pop, how can they possibly even keep the lights on!?)

UPS delivered 40+ CD's. I filled a drive distro by distro before I learned about multi-booting... (yes, ouch!)

Think it was late VL 3 or early 4, SOHO that bubbled up to the top of the pack, right above Slackware, BackTrace (which is really slackware), and Knoppix and Debian. The latter two only because of stuff they have I need - (until I finally learn to package that is

And oh yes, that funny, fat orange-brown looking distro - ah, what do they call it, SnoozeBuntoes?It's disk1 is my favorite coffee coaster - 'cause it came the same color as my coffee - and you really need to be *awake* before you use it ;-P

Back in late 2004 I was getting really annoyed with my WinXP running slow because processes in the system were 'stealing' my CPU, the XP had replaced the imbecile WinME I had purchased together with my PC. Running on an Athlon 1200 MHz and with 256 MB RAM, I had to look for something not to heavy. Asked one of my colleagues, he had been running Mandriva (Mandrake) for some time, and he was very keen to have me running Linux as well.

So I went around looking for a Linux that would run smooth on my Athlon system, and on hhtp://www.linuxpusher.dk (I am living id Denmark) I found a distro designed to run well on old hardware - Let's try that on out, after all Linuxpusher's price for a CD was a mere 20 DKK + postage (that would be around 4 USD at the time), so I bought the CD with VL SOHO 5.0.1, and received it the next day !!

before that, I have never tried partitioning, so I ran through the VL setup tutorial, and in less than an hour I had a PC with dual boot, and I was happy to see that VL included OpenOffice and all the multimedia stuff.

As of today I am running VL 5.9 SOHO DELUXE with NO dual boot, and I AM SO HAPPY WITH IT.

Very similar story to many above, went looking for something to extend the life of old hardware. Played with many early distros, DSL, Puppy, and early Fedora (slooowwwww) and many more...at the time had a P11 desktop with W98 and a P1 laptop.

Found VL at about 3.2/4.0 which were promoted as working on old machines. Dabbled with all releases since, invested in 5.9.1 SOHO Deluxe, its on an old IBM T23 laptop and a HP Omnibook Xe3L 1Gz.

Currently run 6.0 Std on a Vista dual boot HP 6150 with 2gb of mem. Have just about set it up with what I use on the vista side, just waiting to see if there will be a 6.0 SOHO Deluxe release or just the Deluxe which I will also purchase.

Only issues up to the 5.9.1 distro was with wireless, and the 6.0 release was getting my HP M1005 MFP to work, all eventually resolved with a bit of head scratching and googling.:-)

Hmmmm,...Don't remember exactly how it was that I discovered Vector. I've only been using it since 5.9,...but it's absolutely a keeper! I just had two older PIIIs then,..and needed something that seemed more "solid" than Puppy (even though Puppy Linux runs well on my old machines). I have since gotten two more computers that are of the "older" persuasion,...but a lot better than what I had. I'm now with Vector 6.0 Std,...and it seems to me to be just like running one of the "bigger" distros,...only faster. It's loaded with all the features I could need or want, (OOTB)! Vector is staying on my PIIIs,...(no distro-hopping here,.....no need to).